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Blog topic: Q&A

Our Preservation Week posts continue today with Lucy Castro and Caleb Cochran from the Binding and Finishing unit. Our Binding and Finishing team prepares the general collection print and media materials for shelving, reformatting, and commercial bindery. Their work helps prolong the useful life of our circulating collections.

This week, libraries around the country will share preservation tips and stories for the American Library Association’s annual Preservation Week. You can find preservation resources, quick tips, and free webinars on the Preservation Week site covering the spectrum of collection care from textiles to personal digital archives. We will spend this week meeting some of the people that support preservation and conservation activities across Stanford Libraries. Team members from Preservation, Digital Library Systems and Services, and Special Collections have answered five questions about themselves and their work on the long-term care of our books, archives, audio-visual resources, and born-digital files.

We kick off Preservation Week with Monique Murphy, Operations Manager for the Preservation Department.

[This was originally posted on the blog "Free Government Information"] I thought I'd recount an interesting little research question I had yesterday that took me down a rabbit hole trying to answer. This student was looking for an edition of a 1913 publication called the "Immigration Laws and Rules" (WorldCat helpfully notes the uniform titles of "Laws, etc." and "Immigration Laws"!) but couldn’t find the right one in google books (go figure!).

Question: Are there any official government resources where this information is published? I am looking for a statistic along the lines of "The government spends $___ million on cybersecurity." From what I have seen for biosecurity, for example, many departments have some money set aside for biosecurity, but there isn't one place where one large number is published (unless an outside person consolidates these budgets into a singular dollar amount as some sort of project).

Question: I need population figures for various countries starting at about 1850. Is there a resource I can check for such data?

Answer: You should start with B. R. Mitchell's International Historical Statistics: 1750-2005. It's shelved in the Information Center Statistics area and there are three volumes: 1) Africa, Asia and Oceania; 2) The Americas; 3) Europe.